I would recommend a good internship over any other way of learning, and I would vote for extending the GI bill to help pay for them. Code school won't turn you

I would recommend a good internship over any other way of learning, and I would vote for extending the GI bill to help pay for them. Code school won't turn you into much of a coder, nor will an Ivy League university. They will establish some sort of foundation, but I think the benefit-per-month and -per-dollar is not the best. And this is coming from someone who loved school, mades As and Bs, and graduated from a university. Books and online resources are not the whole answer either, not for a beginner. You need a jump start. Maybe school would get you jump started, but an internship would be even better. And this is coming from someone who read thick books cover to cover on JavaScript, Apache, and SQL. I seem to do well with books, not needing a class --- but I wonder if I could have done it without some solid real-life problems to sink my teeth into. I didn't get an internship. I got even better: a job where I could learn on the job --- basically a paid internship. Humans learn best through apprenticeship, on-the-job demonstration, using more than one of their five senses, question-and-answer. It was true in the Middle Ages, and it's true now. We haven't changed. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a human face-to-face interaction.